Can social science play a role in better communication?

In a recent Camargue podcast we reflected on this question with the help of someone who studies it in some depth. Dr Chris Jones is an environmental psychologist, and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Portsmouth. He and his team conduct research into attitudes towards proposed technologies and developments ‘on both sides of the plug socket’ – that’s to say both energy infrastructure and technologies that require power. 

The team’s aim is to understand what makes us think the way we do about new things. They find that rarely are things as black and white as they may seem – and this has implications for the way in which we can most effectively communicate with stakeholders of all kinds.

One of Dr Chris’s guiding principles is that gaining an understanding of attitudes at an early stage is vital. This isn’t just about being able to navigate likely challenges that are unearthed through research or focus groups. Instead, an understanding over likely concerns, and what drives them, as well as over how any new developments would be used or interacted with, can and should help shape the development process. 

So what can we learn about the way attitudes are formed, and how they may be grouped or linked?

“How people think about technologies is going to be different depending upon how personally relevant that that technology is to them,” Chris told us on the podcast. “And this is why you often get a discrepancy between how people think about a technology when it's considered in principle.”

He continued: “sometimes people will be objectionable on the grounds of the technology itself and its proximity to them, and the implications it has for them. And maybe they have every right to be concerned in some instances, and we shouldn't be pejorative about that kind of position. But in some cases it's nothing to do with the technology. It's to do with the procedure.”

Chris raises a vital point over how we view opposition, or support, for development. If we make assumptions and group perceived objections into a homogenous ‘anti’ position, we risk getting the messaging and its delivery dramatically wrong. The implications of this? We fail to make the right arguments that may actually be effective in gaining support if positioned correctly. And as a result we don’t enable people to constructively feed into a process where views shape a development pathway.

There will also be cases where the opposite could be true. We could create a series of granular messages where this isn’t needed or most effective. In many instances, peoples’ attitudes to different things are interlinked, and where this is the case there may just be one central argument that is most persuasive.

There are of course also risks over taking attitudes at face value. Speaking again on the podcast, Chris explained: “There's always a risk if you're asking people about really innovative technologies that they don't know enough about them to provide you with a firm steer on what they actually think. There's a concept called a pseudo attitude or a pseudo opinion, which is where people will give you an answer to a question about the thing that they think you're talking about. And so this can then give you a spurious steer in terms of what people think of that technology once they learn what it actually is.”

In reality, of course, people are going to encounter developments and technologies that are new to them. Data centres, nuclear power sites, onshore wind and solar - which we know are all set to expand rapidly - may be very new to people, and they’ll soon be realities. In each case, Dr Chris’s advice rings true; we’ll only make an informed case for these essential developments if we understand what truly shapes peoples’ attitudes. 

You can listen to this episode of the Camargue podcast here.